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Thursday, August 21, 2014

Quebec Tribalism Fades

Most of my readers are barely aware of the tribalism promoted by
politically driven individuals in the Canadian province of Quebec for
the past two generations. I suspect that streak had now completely
run its course with the demise a few months past of the eighteen
month long minority government of Ms Marois who was the
quintessential true believer in the dream.

Her tenure showed all just how low the dream could go and she has
been washed from office and from this item, washed from the cultural
tapestry of Quebec itself. That all serious French parents how
ensure that their children speak clear English quickly is really the
final nail in the whole separatist coffin.

Quebec is not becoming more English, but everyone is making sure that
they can accept job offers in Alberta or New York for that matter.
That alone puts governance on notice to clean up their act. As well
the Mob controlled contracting cartel in Quebec has been decisively broken.

Petty language
spats have all but vanished in Quebec since Marois’ ouster

This week, my National
Post colleague, Chris Selley, notes that “Quebec’s cultural
protectionists are in another embarrassing uproar.” This time, the
subject isn’t Anglicized pasta or some fresh hijab scare, but
rather a Montreal rap band (the Dead Obies) that performs in a mix of
French and English. At least two columnists are appalled by this
mash-up of Canada’s two official languages: Christian Rioux of Le
Devoir, who describes it as a symptom of cultural “suicide,” and
Mathieu Bock-Côté ofLe Journal de Montréal, who calls it a sign of
“cultural autism.”

In regards that last
phrase, it might be pointed out to M. Bock-Côté that some of the
stereotypical characteristics associated with autistic individuals —
a propensity to hold forth extemporaneously on obscure and tedious
subjects, a lack of self-awareness, anti-social tendencies, etc. —
are all prominent hallmarks of obsessive cultural nationalists. Some
folks like to go out to the train tracks and count the number of
passing freight cars. Others turn on the radio and count the number
of English words. Which kind are you, M. Bock-Côté?

Chris Selley calls
Messrs. Bock-Côté and Rioux “irrelevant middle-aged men shaking
their fists at their radios.” The same might well be said for
theJournal de Montreal’s Gilles Proulx, who has taken towarning
Quebecers about Jewish plots to dominate the world economy. Jews can
“make any government submit” to their will, he wrote in a column
about Gaza. And then on the radio, he added that when Jews “take
economic control,” it serves to “provoke the hatred of local
nations, whether it is in Spain, for example, with the Inquisition,
or again later with Adolf Hitler.”

But the only reason
that such kooks can be written off as “irrelevant” is that
Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois got the boot in April’s
provincial election. If Ms. Marois and her values-charter lieutenant,
Bernard Drainville, were still in power, how would they react to the
Dead Obies controversy?

I doubt they’d be
dumb enough to try to propose actually legislating against Franglais
rap. On the other hand, this is the party that wet its collective
pants over the sight of pre-adolescent soccer players wearing
turbans, and then tried to convince us that Ontario-born frat dudes
at McGill were conspiring to “steal” the Quebec election. (Those
Anglos — always provoking the hatred of local nations.) So it’s
hard to say.

I’ve been spending a
lot of time with Montrealers this month — both in Montreal itself,
and in Ogunquit, Maine, a beach town where “Je Me Souviens”
graces every second or third licence plate in many hotel parking
lots. It’s quite amazing to observe the difference that just four
months can make.

During the 18-month
Marois reign, even the most petty ethnic or linguistic
dispute became grist for widespread anxiety and bitterness —
because the PQ was desperate to seize on any pretext to fire up the
nativists and separatists who comprised its core supporters. It’s
hard to remember a comparably ugly period in the political culture of
any province. Now that Ms. Marois is gone, on the other
hand, the whole province is free to roll their eyes at the likes of
M. Bock-Côté. The newly elected Liberal Premier, Philippe
Couillard, has no appetite for this nonsense. His focus properly lies
on kickstarting the province’s (sluggish) economy and reducing its
(massive) debt. Mixed-language rap music and the alleged scheming of
the Elders of Zion don’t interest him.

Much has been written
about the PQ’s insidious impact on Quebec politics. What has been
less remarked upon — in other provinces, at least — is how
thoroughly the shrill nastiness of Ms. Marois and her administration
seeped into the everyday life of ordinary Quebecers. On
the subway, in restaurants, at gas stations, interactions between
English and French, Jew and gentile, Muslim and non-Muslim, became
more fraught. In one notorious case, at the cafeteria of Montreal’s
Jewish General Hospital, a worker became so enraged when a customer
refused to speak French that she allegedly assaulted him with a
thrown tomato sandwich. English-language social media and radio
call-in shows were full of similar stories. Then came the April 7
election, and suddenly the stories stopped.

During a recent trip
to Montreal, I stopped by my old childhood home on Dufferin Road, in
the city’s heavily Anglo Hampstead area. The couple that moved in
35 years ago, Nina and Louis, still lives there, and we’ve stayed
friendly. He’s a lawyer. She’s a nurse who does shifts at the
Jewish General.

In 2013 and early
2014, she told me, banal workplace disagreements — a discussion
over who was getting what shifts, for example — began degenerating
into tribalized conflicts between French and English. (In my friend’s
case, it was alleged that she was getting choice assignments because
the managing nurse was a fellow Anglo.) People who’d worked
together for decades suddenly were seeing one another through Bernard
Drainville’s paranoid language lens.

The only upside, she
tells me, was the magnified spirit of solidarity among
Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu medical professionals who had been put
on notice that they would no longer be permitted to wear highly
visible religious indicators under Drainville’s aborted secularism
charter.

“At the time, we
were making plans to move away if the PQ got their majority,” she
told me. “To British Columbia, maybe. Or Ottawa. Practically
everyone on this block was considering similar plans. And then the
election came, and suddenly our anxieties disappeared. Poof. Just
like that.”

“You walk into a
store now, and the salesperson says ‘bonjour, hi,’ and everyone
just smiles at one another like it’s normal — which it is,” her
husband Louis tells me. Yet that was exactly the sort of thing that
made the PQ hit the roof”: Back in February, PQ language minister
Diane De Courcy declared that if her party won a majority, she would
lead the charge to stamp out symptoms of “institutionalized
bilingualism,” and cited the use of “Bonjour / Hi” as a
specific example.

This general sense of
crankiness afflicted relationships among Francophones, as well.
During a lunch at Pendeli’s, around the corner from my old home
(acknowledged by many to be one of the city’s finest pizzerias),
Lise Ravary of the Journal de Montreal told me that workplace
tempers ran so high on the issue of the PQ’s secularism charter
that the newspaper’s management had to intervene when colleagues
began subjecting Ms. Ravary (who is anti-charter) to ad hominem
abuse. “This was a level of personal conflict you didn’t even see
during the last referendum,” she tells me. “At the same time, I
suddenly wasn’t welcome at certain book launches and TV shows.
People I’d known for half a lifetime wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Then came the
election,” she adds. “Now that it’s all over, we’re all
friends again.”

Unfortunately, though
the Liberals’ victory in April has helped repair friendships, it
hasn’t supplied a magical elixir for fixing the province’s
economy. Parts of Montreal’s downtown continue to betray an
alarmingly high commercial vacancy rate. But there is a widespread
sense that, at the very least, the province averted the full-blown
economic meltdown that might have unfolded if Ms. Marois had won
re-election. Tens of thousands of wealthy Montrealers might have
fled, taking billions with them.

Leon Elfassy, a
Hampstead town councillor who focuses on urban development, told me
he already is seeing a noticeable uptick. “The vibe is better, and
now some people are more motivated to invest — to put down deeper
roots,” he told me. “Many of my constituents, who had been
looking to go down [Highway] 401, feel at ease with Couillard.
Suddenly, we’re looking at a lot of real-estate projects, including
Hampstead’s first high-rise condo [Le Belvedere Hampstead, which
formerly had been put on hold because of a lack of buyer interest].
During my two-and-a-half mandates in Hampstead, I’ve never seen so
much activity.”

By sheer coincidence,
the PQ’s election loss coincided with a lot of other welcome
developments: the end of winter, the onset of Montreal’s festival
season and a new era of stability at city hall thanks to the election
of Denis Coderre as mayor in late 2013.

“If you ask around
the business community, there has been a weight taken off of
everyone’s shoulders,” says Dan Delmar, a radio host at
Montreal’s CJAD and a managing partner at a communications firm.
“In my business, I had calls that suddenly started coming in —
clients that had waited for a while to spend money. They’re now
back online.”

On the negative side,
he tells me, many Anglos and ethnic voters haven’t quite stopped
gloating over Ms. Marois’ downfall. “A lot of folks remain very
bitter about her government,” he says. “Even weeks after the
election, I was still getting all sorts of messages about her. You
can’t underestimate the pain she caused. This was a woman who had
been in power for a year and a half, and had never appeared on CJAD,
which is basically the English-language voice of Montreal.
She bypassed the whole Anglo media.”

“It was a really
strange road the province went down during those 18 months,” Ms.
Ravary tells me. Even for tolerant-minded Francophones who rejected
the secularism charter and had little fear of the English language,
Pauline Marois and her ilk elicited a disquieting sense of internal
conflict. “On the one hand, we were being sent this message that
opposing the PQ and the charter meant we were being disloyal to ‘the
tribe,’ ” Ms. Ravary tells me. “But at the same time, we knew
deep down that the whole thing was damaging to Quebec’s soul, and
an embarrassment. So we were torn.

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About Me

Jan 2015 - 3 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled 'Paradigms Shift'. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.